2 - 2 - 2 Me and You

For the inaugural exhibition in our home gallery, Elbow Room is pleased to present 2-2-2 Me and You, a presentation of works by Brian Teters.  Bunched together on the wall, his eccentric hybrid figures coalesce into busy worlds bursting with the maximalist color and clatter of a Where’s Waldo?  street scene.  Look closely at any of the individual paper fragments that animate his kitchen-sink arrangements, and more often than not you will find a hastily scrawled dedication–To Mom, From Brian; To Ian, From Brian; To Katie, From Brian–naming the person in his life for whom each piece was lovingly constructed.  His work is grounded in these tiny gestures of affection.

Brian constructs his miniature collages quickly and with purpose, switching fluidly between disparate tools, techniques, and image sources guided by a combinatory logic akin to a mnemonic matching game–landscapes from National Geographic stand in as mental snapshots of family trips to Mt. Hood and the Oregon Coast, bicycles and musical instruments are selected as tokens of his father; he sees his mother in a flowerbed from Better Homes & Gardens and so builds her a paper bouquet.  When he finishes a batch of figures he gets up from his desk, presents his tiny gifts, and finds a home for them in his immediate environment.  Over the past year the sprawl of his work has grown to encompass nearly every wall in our studio as well as windows, doors and less conventional surfaces.  He seems almost entirely unconcerned with fashioning singular art objects–Brian’s project is a perpetual practice of making and maintaining a world.  

This world–an exploded atlas of personal association lovingly cobbled from scraps of Hollywood animation, American iconography, wildlife photography, children’s literature, popular music, fairy tales, and advertising–is neither fixed nor precious.  New characters go up as others are taken down or thrown away and over time his walls gradually change as if stuck to the seasons of a private calendar.  In their endless commingling and accumulation these aesthetic fragments give way to a DIY fantasia of counterintuitive juxtapositions, a universe fantastically off-kilter and held together by glue stick and bits of colored tape, capable of registering scenes of pastoral sentimentality and Looney Tunes absurdity in the same space.  At times, his compositions are startling for their sprawling flatness, and his figures tend to float around each other devoid of any legible symbolic hierarchy.  Anthropomorphized owls rendered in pencil and ink, a stick-figure Little Bo Peep, ballroom debutantes, references to Shrek and A Goofy Movie, and plain, unaltered magazine clippings of dogs and houses and cans of paint are all equally at home in Brian’s good-neighbored ecology.  There is a palpable kindness running through these sweetly jumbled compositions symmetrical with the generous and generative practice they spring from.

Due to the impermanent, process-oriented, and dispersed nature of Brian’s practice, we do not see the pieces presented here as wholly self-contained works.  Instead, we see them as postcards from the multiverse, as squigglevision valentines, as gifts.  They are addressed “2-2-2 Me and You”, from Brian.

- Quinn Gancedo 

the artist at the opening reception for 2 - 2 -2 Me and You, holding a root beer